If there are accidents, I quite by accident met my friend Wan in the street the other evening.
Wan is one those incredibly informed persons whose sincere modesty shames one to credulity. When I told him what follows, he remarked, “Ahh, you mean ‘transubstantiation’, cher. Abracadabra. Magic. Blood into wine, bread into flesh, like the Catholic Mass. You know, when the priest says This is my blood. This is my body. Poof! Magic. Surely it is.”
Later, on my way home, I read that the anthropologist Donald Brown says that all human beings, whom he calls “Universal People”, practice magic and dance.
So, I met the top Flamenco performer Eva Yerbabuena at a lunch, I told Wan; she sat across from me. I confided to him what a positively beautiful woman she is and I added that she is a perceptive bundle of presence, charm and animation. She moves like a well-mannered panther, I said; she isn’t fond of fatty foods, either, I remarked, as befits a person who has actually to work with her body rather than just use it. Eva Yerbabuena is a stage name. She was born Eva María Garrido García in Germany to Spanish Gastarbeiters in the years I was doing my army service there. She was early packed off to Spain.
During a short pre-lunch presentation of herself and the esthetic and cultural importance of Festival Arte Flamenco, Eva Yerbabuena plucks the back of her wrist, says that Flamenco is “carne y hueso” – flesh and bone, a vessel. The Festival’s artistic director, Sandrine Rabassa, interprets.
Carne y hueso is the title of Yerbabuena's newest piece.
When we sit down to eat, Eva Yerbabuena tells me she started doing Flamenco at 11. I learn later that her career began at 15. When I ask about it, she says Flamenco is the art of transmitting “the moment”. She plucks the back of her wrist and continues, explaining that “the moment” (within the vessel of carne y huesos ?) is the ecstasy created by the combination of Flamenco’s exactly precise (not intense) movement, percussive guitar rhythms and rough, acapella-flavored song.
The moment “where I get goosebumps”, she concludes. Someone near me murmurs loud, “like an orgasm”. Sandrine Rabassa, still interpreting, hears the remark, thinks about it, with silence acquiesces. The people around me nod.
Eva Yerbabuena continues. The part of the professional in Flamenco, she says, is transmitting “the moment” even when she cannot herself feel the ecstasy in it. She pulls out her phone. She taps up a private video of a dozen or so African villagers stamping their feet together, like in an Irish clog dance.
That is Flamenco, she says, handing the phone around.
Eva Yerbabuena’s performances, along with such Flamenco dancers, singers and musicians as Maria Moreno, Joaquin Grilo, Antonio Rey, Diego del Morao, Maria
Terremoto, Inès Bacanor and Olga Pericet, make up the offering of the 31st annual Festival Arte Flamenco from 2 to 6 July in the little city of Mont de Marsan.
Mont de Marsan, which, like so much of the French Southwest has strong and long-standing social, economic and cultural ties to Spain and the Basque lands, is an excellent place to start an exploratory tour of the one of this most charming region of France, lying on the edge of the flat pine-lands called “Les Landes” and by car about an 1.30h from Bordeaux in the north or Biarritz in the south and 2.30h from the lovely city of Toulouse to the West. In addition to a full calendar of best-quality Flamenco performance, the program turns around cultural participation and education, including dance training and local school activities, films, exhibitions and activities meant to expose the general public to the art.
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